Figuring it all out: overrated. You figure it all out, and then where are you at? Somewhere new with new shit to figure out. Fuck that. Vicious cycle. It’s pretty clear in any given situation what you need to do, what you owe yourself and others and which is more important, if they’re not the same thing. Everything else is just mind clutter and wants. Do what you need to do and everything else falls into place. Wei wu wei, baby.
‘Course, what the fuck do I know? 
Heya all. If you haven’t seen me, it’s because I’ve been spending time hanging out with my drunken-ass friend Dan Mobley, who’s only in town every coupla years or so, then goes back to Guam, where the whores are cheap and the liquor’s cheaper. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I’ll have to ask him.
When I haven’t been hanging out with Dan, drinking like a goddamned drain, I’ve been playing Oblivion, or hanging out at the Greenbelt or taking pictures or some combination of the above. These are important things.
If I promised I’d come over to your place and haven’t, then I will. Someday. Soon. Soon-ish.
If I said I’d take you out for dinner, well, I didn’t so much forget as stay up drinking until eight in the morning and then pass out for the rest of the day. I’ll make it up to ya.
If I said I’d help you walk your dog, then I’m a goddamned liar.
That said, none of this would be an issue if you were hanging out with me all the time in the first goddamned place.
Goddamnit, I sure am saying goddamned a lot.
Goddamn.
Anyway, you know who you are, and I’m sorry. I’ll do anything to make it up to you.*
You should come out the Greenbelt next Saturday, earlier this time. Going to Sculpture falls if it’s running good and hard. Longer walk, easier trail. Fewer rattlesnakes. Still aiming for food at 3p though.
Talk to ya soon,-k. ^-^
*–”anything” should not here be construed to mean anything that I don’t like doing to begin with. I am an asshole, after all.
I know it’s been almost three weeks since I posted anything to mah beloved blog here. I haven’t stopped taking pictures, I’ve just been concentrating mostly on technical stuff that mostly isn’t worth posting, and in my attempts to keep pushing at what I can do, have generally had a lot more failures than success lately. I will post some stuff of the stuff later, if not tonight then tomorrow or something.
Things I’ve learned:
Always check your settings before you take a picture, if it’s been more than 5 seconds since you took the last one. Is focus manual or auto? What’s the white balance setting? Exposure compensation–where’s that at? Is macro mode on? What’s the ISO setting? Am I in manual, aperature, shutter, program mode? What’s my aperature/shutter set to?
Failure to ask these questions has bitten me in the rear more than any single other issue, as I’ve set something to get a particular shot and not cleared it later.
Sunday I decided I was going to go hike the Greenbelt again, as I hadn’t done it in quite some time, and not at all since I got my E-10. I started out at Westgate again, and this time, having a better sense of location, discovered that there is in fact a trail that takes you all the way to the greenbelt proper in about 18 minutes.
I then hiked around a bit and after quite a bit of hemmng and hawing decided to head upstream to Scottish Woods trail and see if I could find any water. As you can tell from the pictures, it took a good long while to find any. Sculpture falls has, at long last, pretty much dried up. Even the most upstream of the falls at Scottish Woods wasn’t flowing, although the next one downstream was, and had a pool of incredibly refreshing water behind it. I had to get out as soon as I got in, though, to go meet various TAMU alumni for a trip out to lake Travis, and proceeded to make a hellacious uphill hike where I managed to give my camera a nasty knock that resulted in it acting a bit goofy ever since.
This made me very, very, very, very, very, very sad, especially as I was at the time under the impression that it had simply stopped working. I found out later that I can get it to work again by tilting it 30 degrees to the right and giving it a sharp whack on the right side of the case.
Despite my unhappiness over this, I had a helluva time out on the lake, but then was helping to load up my buddy Dave’s boat slipped and fell into the water with my brand new cell phone in my pocket, rendering it inoperable as well.
This also did not really improve my mood. It’s all seemed to work out in the end, though, as after a day of drying out, my cell phone is back in working order, and my camera was in working enough order that I was able to get some pretty nice pictures from the UT campus after work today.
And, to be fair, I did have a good time all around, so I guess it’s a wash.
More news: I can’t post all the pictures I want to this site that convey a story of the places I visited and things I saw, without diluting the quality of the pictures in terms of charting my progress in the act of taking them. So, I’m going to break out my best pics to another site, il.lusion.org, just about my photography. Height of arrogance, I know, but I’m an arrogant bastard, so there it is.
I’m working on some gallery-making software to make this possible and easy. It’s pretty early on, but I’m calling it, completely inappropriately, Galleria. I’ll give it a site when I get it at least semi-finished.
…of my three day weekend. I’ve had one hell of a time so far. Yesterday morning I ate breakfast at lunch at Juan in a Million on Ceasar Chavez a few blocks east of I-35. I’d never been there before, but I had three damned good bacon, potato, egg, and cheese breakfast tacos for $2.70, and you can bet I’ll be going there again.
After I ate I had Mark drop me off at the MoPac access, where I intended to hike as far upstream as I could. Twin falls has turned into a mud puddle, just completely gone. Sculpture is drier than I’ve seen it before, but still there and still flowing, as is the spring-fed pool just downstream.
I managed to splash my camera with water or something while at Sculpture, putting it out of commission for the rest of the day, so I didn’t get any pictures of the kamikaze sunfish that attacked my legs to protect its younguns, or the pair of baby armadillos I found way further west, or the big grass snake I almost stepped on at the end of the day. Doesn’t matter–I saw them.
About half an hour upstream of Sculpture I ran into a small natural falls with a long, deep pool on the upstream side, and a lot of rocks bathed in shallow running water on the downstream side. It was a really nice place, although it doesn’t support nearly as much of a “people load” as the two big falls downstream.
About 5 minutes upstream of that I found a semi-synthetic fall, big rocks with concrete poured into the gaps to make a big, straight, two-tiered fall with a fairly deep pool at the bottom. Both of these are pretty much straight across from Scottish Woods Trail.
I kept going upstream until a fair bit after the trail on the north side ran out, and I was basically just fighting my way cross-country. At some point this became untenable and I just started walking in the creek, which was by this point knee-deep and flat-bottomed anyway. A bit later on it started to get deep again, so I made my way to the south bank and discovered that there was trail on that side, too. I followed that trail all the way up to Lost Creek Blvd, and then followed it, uphill all the way, to 360. I later got a look at a map and found out that this was, to put it charitably, the long way ’round.
That was about it, but it was hella fun.
…I wonder when I’ll pay for it?
It started out merely okay–I got up at 9:00, but didn’t do much of anything except watch Appleseed with Jay, up until about 4pm. That’s when Dan called and invited us to throw in on a pontoon boat rental out on lake Travis. I hadn’t anything more planned for the afternoon than for the morning, so I jumped all over that, and it turned out to be a hell of a good decision. It was so much of a blast that I’m labeling the gallery Lake Travis 1, because I’m sure there’ll be a couple more before the summer’s over.
After that I ended up going to a party at a friend of friend’s house, and met this fine-looking woman Sara(h), who is presumably none of the Sara(h)s in my old phone, although I’m told I met her before, back in the Metropolis daze. She’s in town for the summer, and studying for the NY bar exam. She’s a gonna be an IP lawyer. We spent a goodly portion of the night talking about IP law, Lawrence Lessig (she was at the Canadian Creative Commons inaugural conference, and apparently got to hang out with him some over the course of it), America’s role in the world, just exactly how evil, to put a point on it, big business is, and hella other stuff. Damn. Damn Damn Damn.
I’m gonna cook some food and hit the trail.
I fear that I will never get my cell phone to charge again, and so today, after leaving it off for a while, I turned it on to copy out as many phone numbers and names as I could. I got them all.
All the ones that I cared about, that is. Out of probably 200 entries in my phone book, I wrote out 51 of them. The others were either people who had died, I didn’t know any more, didn’t have the same numbers any more, didn’t want to talk to any more, or just plain didn’t recognize (How does one end up with “Sara”, “Sarah”, “Sarah B”, and “Sarah C” in one’s phone book, without knowing a single Sara(h)? I blame drugs).
I don’t know whether to be sad or happy at this slimming of my circle of acquaintances. After all, 51 isn’t a bad number, and it’s one that keeps growing. That phone was only 3 years old, after all.
